iwoca celebrates its 7th birthday old today. Hurray!

It’s iwoca’s birthday! We’ll be blowing out seven candles on our cake today.Our company was founded back in 2011 by Christoph Rieche, our CEO, and James Dear, our CTO, and we’ve been incredibly busy ever since then.

It’s a fantastic birthday present for us to know that, through all the hard work, we’ve funded 21,500 small businesses to date, and loaned £600m to businesses across Europe.

And, as the icing on the cake, in 2018 we reached profitability, putting us in the best position to keep on breaking down the barriers stopping small businesses from accessing finance. Our mission is always small business, first.

To celebrate this milestone, we’ve had a quick look at where we’ve come from 2011, and where we’re going next.
2018 has been a big year for us: we’ve seen 110 people join the company, from Tech and Analysis to Customer Success. New teams have been nurtured, and existing teams have been expanded to make sure our own growing business is also thriving (and it helps to have 214 voices to sing ‘happy birthday iwoca’ today).

iwoca has grown swiftly from our humble beginnings of two people in 2011, and 2018 has been one of the biggest years yet for people joining our mission. In fact, we have six new joiners starting next week alone.

But with all these people joining, we’ve had to make sure we’ve got enough space to keep them in. We’ve had three offices now (and several coffee shops when we were starting out), with any future moves (hopefully not for a while) now being the unenviable but admirable task of Seema Desai, our COO. Over seven years we’ve moved from Fulham, to Shaftesbury Avenue, to our wonderful, open offices on Tottenham Court Road, where we have two floors full of people dedicated to the cause (do come in and say hello if you’re nearby; we're a friendly lot).

Looking to the future, we also spoke to some of our newest starters, Tolu, Jack and Harriet, about their first few weeks at iwoca.

Harriet joined as a Technical Business Analyst, after finishing a Physics degree at Edinburgh University. Her advice to any new starters is ‘don’t be afraid to strike up conversations with everyone, and make sure to bring your whole self to work every day’. Harriet will be working with the tech team, and is especially excited about the impact companies like iwoca can make with Open Banking, where we’re poised to really disrupt the sector.

Tolu just started as a Quality Assurance Officer in the Customer Success team. She was attracted to iwoca, and the alternative lending sector more generally, because of its rapid growth and the pool of opportunity that follows. She wants to build on the transparency of iwoca, which she’s found refreshing, and lauds the many moving parts that keeps the company ticking. ‘You don’t just talk it, you do it’.

Jack has joined iwoca from Loughborough University, where he did an Economics degree. He’s said he really appreciates the fact everyone has made an effort to get to know him, and he’s been surprised by the sheer diversity of people he’s met here. It’s not every day you get to work next to an athlete in a fintech company.

It’s been an incredibly exciting seven years for us here, and we’re all looking forward to seeing what the next seven will bring.